POLITICS 212(TH) HISTORY OF WESTERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Prof. Sammy Basu Department of Politics Willamette University mailto:sbasu@willamette.edu

Historiography and Aristotle

	Author	Text	Context
Whig	Aristotle was a resident alien, who appreciated that citizenship was a precious privilege and obligation. He put more stock in the common propertied citizen, and the sensible conservation of evolved practices of societies than Plato.	Early theorist of freedom who was repelled by the authoritarian unified closed society he saw in Plato/Socrates, and was drawn instead to pragmatic propertied pluralism and the constitutional polity achieving a balance between rich few and poor many, ruling and being ruled in turn, under the rule of law, by relying on strong middle class. In affirming that elements of Athens and Sparta, democracy and oligarchy be retained text anticipates modern bicameralism. More fundamentally he recognizes the way to use potentially divisive class self-interest to strengthen the collective good	Greeks experience the historical reality/inevitability of democracy, namely that people once politically awoken will want to have a share in politics. Hence even as the Macedonian empire expands by force and the sheer will of Alexander, the actual willingness to be subject to rule of one or few is fading from Greek culture.
Marxist	Author Aristotle, a resident alien, turns on his fellow aliens by denying them any future as citizens, even though the only reason he is successful in Athens is because he has Macedonian patrons (and in fact once they fall he has to flee). In effect, he becomes an ideological lackey or snob and hence a ‘race/class traitor’ to poor workers and nouveau riche aliens on behalf of ancestral rich propertied Athenian-born citizens and owners.	Text Text insists that in order to be a citizen you have to have virtues, in order to have virtues you have to have leisure, in order to have leisure you have to have property, but you must not need to work physically for that property. It thereby justifies the exclusion from political significance of the working population of slaves, resident aliens, foreigners and women, even as it acknowledges that they are necessary to the self-sufficiency of the society. Moreover, although he is critical of greed and unlimited acquisition he defends private property against the arguments for common ownership (for the guardians) advanced by Plato/Socrates.	Context Democratic regime is a bit of a sham, even though it even pays participants in juries, because it excludes women, resident aliens and slaves (i.e., most manual workers and traders), and practices cultural and economic imperialism in the name of protecting allies and spreading democracy, even as it uses the treasury of the Delian League to rebuild its Acropolis and Parthenon under Pericles.
Feminist	Author In spite of Plato/Socrates on women, Aristotle finds the possibility that women might have merits placing them on the same footing as men to be demonstrably absurd (i.e., both common practices and poets confirm absurdity).	Text Text is riddled with the need to silence women and ensure that they are as an institutional matter relegated to the domestic or private or intimate sphere as the recipient of the reason and spirit and desires of their male superior (father then husband).	Context While Athens was authoritarian and even aristocratic it could tolerate acknowledging the exceptional (ie masculine virtues) rare woman, e.g. the goddess Athena or high priestesses. However, as political consent and participation begin to include more and men with less obvious and distinctive merits themselves, the prospect that women might have to be taken more seriously becomes to much of a threat to men. Home life becomes more authoritarian and hierarchical.
Post-Modern	Author Aristotle is willing himself into the shape of the good Athenian, He is in denial about the successes of grasping, desiring Macedonian empire achieved by young Alex, and is perhaps nostalgic for the old little Athens that repressed excesses of all kinds.	Text Aristotle’s grand theory or meta-narrative of the purposiveness/functionalism of everything in nature in terms of its ends (teleology) lets him disguise what is really the grasping for power by the energies of life with which he associates himself, namely male propertied Athenian Greeks at the expense of those categories that do not fit.	Context Alexander’s embrace of aspects of Persia and Eastern civilizations and transmission of this back to Greece leaves many Greeks deeply troubled by the possibility that almost everything they regard as divinely ordained and their special achievements may actually be arbitrary and socially constructed. They will turn on Macedonians just as soon as they can to reassert their primacy.